Know-How Exchange : Strategy

You are being very vague, I can only answer with some basic information.

In distribution, people buy from those who make them money. A loyalty program will only go so far. If they don't see the line as a profit center,or that you support them in the way they need supported, no loyalty program will help. Make sure you understand why they aren't buying more from you.

Turn the closure of outlets to a sales advantage. Less carrying the line means more exclusivity to the outlets. This is a positive. Talk to them, we are closing these outlets to spend more time and resources on supporting you.

The best loyalty programs are those that reward both the firm and the individual sales staff. The firm gets rebates for coop advertising, the sales staff gets something tangible.

Its a win win-- they get to advertise more which builds their biz as a whole and you position yourself as someone who is making them money.

Paulus

Firstly I do not agree with Carol on this one. Her approach is too text-book. My approach is a little different and rather more subtle. One word of warning: in discussing issues with businesses, if it is a question of money it is the wrong question to be asking.

Okay.

You are going to have to do some work here. What is the one thing that is common amongst your "A" outlets, and your B, C and D. They will all be different. Do some kind of analysis on each and you will find that there is one element that is different in each case. I am speaking of geography, demographics and so on.

Do this for your best clients too. They too will have some feature that makes your better stores a magnet to them. Use that in other places to get that quality segment of your customers. There is also my most subtle technique yet, the "silent dog whistle for clients" which would take too long to describe here.

Another aspect to consider is what your stores don't do. There are those who complain as a pasttime - they are customers well worth ridding yourself of. Again there are subtle ways to achieve this. The most obvious is to have a decent USP. You can answer their complaints straight off - and as I discovered with our building firm - doing this meant that they had no comeback and therefore no angle from which to complain. Without that pleasure in store, there was nothing for them to stay around for. Our profits leapt by 30% simply because we were focussing on the clients who liked us*.

if you have a sales force that is only selecting on the basis of sales - they aren't doing their job. Just "landing a sale" in our day and age is to say that they don't give a fig about anything.

If you have 500 outlets, you need a real professional trainer in there, now. This is an issue that demands a little more than responses on a forum.

To your success,
Moriarty xx

*We were a small firm and dramatic leaps like this are not unknown. With a larger firm it is less easy to achieve, and takes longer.